The Gender of Ideas

You were probably much younger when you learned the parts of speech that are needed to build sentences: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on. You learned that a noun is a person, place, or thing-- book, rock, air, happiness, my great-aunt Sharon—these are all nouns. Generally speaking, if you can put a definite or indefinite article in front of a word and the word makes sense, it’s a noun.

_{le chien}

In French, all nouns have gender--not just nouns like homme [man], which is masculine, and femme [woman], which is feminine. For instance, the noun idée [idea] is feminine, and the noun diamant [diamond] is masculine. If you try to figure out why one noun is feminine and another is masculine, you will get a headache. Also, you will miss a key point about French and other languages like it. An object’s or idea’s gender has nothing to do with the kind of gender we assign to people or animals. For most nouns, gender is entirely random.

Even though the gender of most nouns is unrelated to any quality of that object or idea, you still need to learn the gender of every French noun. Otherwise, you’ll really confuse your listeners or readers when you try to use French to communicate! That’s because other parts of speech-- not just articles but also adjectives and some verb forms and pronouns-- have to agree with the noun’s gender to make sense in French. The best way to learn the gender of French nouns is to include the appropriate article with each noun in your vocabulary lists. Instead of a list like this:

That way, the article will be attached to the noun in your brain, and you won’t spend the next several years asking people, "Is ___ masculine or feminine?"

_{I mean, you want to be able to tell
le petit chat how cute he is, right?}

For example:

La fille
Le garçon
Le chat
La personne

Choose the correct article for each of the following nouns. Most of these nouns are ones you’ve encountered in the lesson video or in examples, but there are a couple you may have to guess. Think carefully and use the tips presented in this lesson and the previous module to help guide you.

Is this a grammatically masculine or grammatically feminine noun?

Questions answered correctly:

Questions answered incorrectly:

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Guided Notes

Tutor

Video

How To

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